Glitch gags gossip blog Gawker

Media and celebrity blog site Gawker suffered an outage Tuesday, prompting its avid readers to do some gawking of their own.

Gawker, a popular New York Web log run by Gawker Media, suffered a one-day outage due to a glitch in a credit card transaction, said Susan Wade, a spokeswoman for Network Solutions, which handles the registration of Gawker Media's numerous domain names.

Back in August, a credit card was used to pay for the registration of a new Gawker Media domain name. But due to a glitch in the credit card transaction, it affected Network Solutions' ability to automatically renew the Gawker domain name when it came up for expiration this month. As a result, the site could not be automatically renewed and an outage occurred, Wade said.

"(Publisher Nick) Denton has a lot of friends and contributing writers, so when the site went down in the morning, I got a couple calls," Wade said. Reports in the media also emerged about the site outage.

Although Denton was not immediately available for comment, the publisher posted some blogs on Gawker concerning the outage.

"You may have noticed that Gawker is under construction...the real story is messy. The domain was hijacked by Network Solutions, our registrar. At this point, the technical among you will say that Network Solutions sucks. They've been quick to resolve the problem--Gawker should resume normal service by this evening--but, yes, Network Solutions sucks," Denton noted in his blog.

Gawker's traffic fell by roughly half on Tuesday. Web traffic to the site usually spikes up on Monday and remains fairly constant through the workweek. Gawker averages 54,604 visitors daily.